Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume III, Part 2: 1907-1910 eBook

so in the matter of food that you are always feeble
and hungry. And you never dare to laugh in the
daytime for fear some poor wretch, seeing you in a
good-humor, will try to borrow a dollar of you; and
in church you are always down on your knees, with your
eyes buried in the cushion, when the contribution-box
comes around; and you never give the revenue-officers
a true statement of your income. Now you all know
all these things yourself, don’t you? Very
well, then, what is the use of your stringing out
your miserable lives to a clean and withered old age?
What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly
worthless to you? In a word, why don’t
you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying
to seduce people into becoming as “ornery”
and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your ceaseless
and villainous “moral statistics”?
Now, I don’t approve of dissipation, and I don’t
indulge in it, either; but I haven’t a particle
of confidence in a man who has no redeeming petty
vices whatever, and so I don’t want to hear from
you any more. I think you are the very same man
who read me a long lecture last week about the degrading
vice of smoking cigars and then came back, in my absence,
with your vile, reprehensible fire-proof gloves on,
and carried off my beautiful parlor-stove.

III

From “A strangedream”

(Example of Mark Twain’s Early Descriptive Writing)

. . . In due time I stood, with my companion,
on the wall of the vast caldron which the natives,
ages ago, named ’Hale mau mau’—­the
abyss wherein they were wont to throw the remains
of their chiefs, to the end that vulgar feet might
never tread above them. We stood there, at dead
of night, a mile above the level of the sea, and looked
down a thousand feet upon a boiling, surging, roaring
ocean of fire!—­shaded our eyes from the
blinding glare, and gazed far away over the crimson
waves with a vague notion that a supernatural fleet,
manned by demons and freighted with the damned, might
presently sail up out of the remote distance; started
when tremendous thunder-bursts shook the earth, and
followed with fascinated eyes the grand jets of molten
lava that sprang high up toward the zenith and exploded
in a world of fiery spray that lit up the somber heavens
with an infernal splendor.

“What is your little bonfire of Vesuvius to
this?”

My ejaculation roused my companion from his reverie,
and we fell into a conversation appropriate to the
occasion and the surroundings. We came at last
to speak of the ancient custom of casting the bodies
of dead chieftains into this fearful caldron; and
my comrade, who is of the blood royal, mentioned that
the founder of his race, old King Kamehameha the First—­that
invincible old pagan Alexander—­had found
other sepulture than the burning depths of the ‘Hale
mau mau’. I grew interested at once; I
knew that the mystery of what became of the corpse
of the warrior king hail never been fathomed; I was
aware that there was a legend connected with this
matter; and I felt as if there could be no more fitting
time to listen to it than the present. The descendant
of the Kamehamehas said: